Dark Energy Survey Year Y6 Results Day!

This morning’s arXiv announcement contained a number of papers related to the Dark Energy Survey Y6 analysis. There is also a Zoom webinar later today at 10.30 Central Time (16.30 GMT’; 13.30 in Greeland). Details can be found here.

You can find links to and abstracts of all the papers here, but I thought it would be useful to provide arXiv links to the latest batch here.

• arXiv:2601.14559 Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing – this is the key summary paper.
• arXiv:2601.14484 Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: MagLim++ Lens Sample Selection and Measurements of Galaxy Clustering
• arXiv:2601.14864 Dark Energy Survey: DESI-Independent Angular BAO Measurement
• arXiv:2601.15175 Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Galaxy-galaxy lensing
• arXiv:2601.14833 Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Magnification modeling and its impact on galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing cosmology
• arXiv:2601.14859 Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Weak Lensing and Galaxy Clustering Cosmological Analysis Framework

A number of DES Y6 papers already published – including several in the Open Journal of Astrophysics – are listed here.

I’ll just highlight a couple of points from the first paper listed above, which uses the now standard “3x2pt” analysis, which combines three complementary two-point correlation functions: cosmic shear; galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering. The abstract of this paper is as follows:

A notable result is contained in the last sentence. The simplest interpretation of dark energy is that it is a cosmological constant (usually called Λ) which – as explained here – corresponds to a perfect fluid with an equation-of-state p=wρc2 with w=-1. In this case the effective mass density  ρ of the dark energy remains constant as the universe expands. To parametrise departures from this constant behaviour, cosmologists have replaced this form with the form w(a)=w0+wa(1-a) where a(t) is the cosmic scale factor. A cosmological constant Λ would correspond to a point (w0=-1, wa=0) in the plane defined by these parameters, but the only requirement for dark energy to result in cosmic acceleration is that w<-1/3, not that w=-1. Results last year from DESI suggested values of w0 ≠-1 and wa≠0 , but the current DES results are consistent with w=-1; they do not constrain w0 and wa jointly.

For reference on the left you can find the (w0, wa) plane from DESI.

I thought I’d add one of the other cosmological contraint plots:

The results look qualitatively similar to previous plots but the contours have shifted a bit.

#Cosmology #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #DarkEnergySurvey #DES #DESYear6 #DESI

Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 25/10/2025

It may be a Bank Holiday weekend here in Ireland, but it’s still time for the usual Saturday update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics (although a bit later in the day than usual). Since the last update we have published another five papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 161, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 396.

This week’s update  is rather unusual because there are four papers in a series (or, more precisely, mathematically speaking, a sequence) all published on the same day (Wednesday October 22nd 2025), in the same folder (Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics), with the same first author (Dhayaa Anbajagane of the University of Chicago), with long author lists and many co-authors in common. These papers all relate to the DECADE cosmic shear project. Instead of doing them one by one, therefore, I’ve decided to put all four overlays together and provide links to all the papers afterwards. As I’m trying to encourage people to follow our feed on the Fediverse via Mastodon (where I announce papers as they are published, including the all-important DOI),  I’ll include links to each announcement there too.

The fediverse announcements follow:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

@[email protected]

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project I: A new weak lensing shape catalog of 107 million galaxies" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (54 authors)

https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.146158

Open Journal of Astrophysics

@[email protected]

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project II: photometric redshift calibration of the source galaxy sample" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (53 authors)

https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.146159

Open Journal of Astrophysics

@[email protected]

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project III: validation of analysis pipeline using spatially inhomogeneous data" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (53 authors)

https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.146160

Open Journal of Astrophysics

@[email protected]

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The DECADE cosmic shear project IV: cosmological constraints from 107 million galaxies across 5,400 deg^2 of the sky" by Dhayaa Anbajagane (University of Chicago, USA) et al. (75 authors)

https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.146161

The fifth and final paper for this week is “Clustering of DESI galaxies split by thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect” by Michael Rashkovetskyi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA for short, and 48 others. This one was published on Wednesday 23rd October in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. This paper explores how the clustering properties of galaxies mapped by the Dark energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) relate to the local thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich emission mapped by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The overlay is here:

The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here, and the fediverse announcement is here:

Open Journal of Astrophysics

@[email protected]

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Clustering of DESI galaxies split by thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect" by Michael Rashkovetskyi (Cfa Harvard-Smithsonian, USA) et al. (49 authors)

https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.146033

That concludes the papers for this week. With one week to go and our total at 396, I still think we might reach the 400 total by the end of October.

#ACT #arXiv250217674v2 #arXiv250217675v2 #arXiv250217676v2 #arXiv250217677v2 #arXiv250820904v2 #AtacamaCosmologyTelescope #cosmicShear #Cosmology #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #DECADECosmicShearProject #DESI #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #galaxyClustering #OpenAccess #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics #thermalSunyaevZeldovichEffect #weakGravitationalLensing

Cosmology Results from DESI

Yesterday evening (10pm Irish Time) saw the release of new results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), completing a trio of major announcements of cosmological results in the space of two days (the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Euclid Q1 release being the others). I didn’t see the DESI press conference but you can read the press release here.

There were no fewer than eight DESI papers on the astro-ph section of the arXiv this morning. Here are the titles with links:

• DESI DR2 Results I: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the Lyman Alpha Forest
• DESI DR2 Results II: Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Constraints;
• Construction of the Damped Lyα Absorber Catalog for DESI DR2 Lyα BAO;
• Validation of the DESI DR2 Lyα BAO analysis using synthetic datasets;
• Validation of the DESI DR2 Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Galaxies and Quasars;
• Extended Dark Energy analysis using DESI DR2 BAO measurements;
• Constraints on Neutrino Physics from DESI DR2 BAO and DR1 Full Shape;
• Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.

You can see from the titles that the first seven of these relate to the second data release (DR2; three years of data) from DESI; the last one listed here is a description of the first data release (DR1), which is now publicly available.

Obviously there is a lot of information to digest in these papers so here are two members of the DESI collaboration talking with Shaun Hotchkiss on Cosmology Talks about the key messages from the analysis of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (the BAO in the titles of the new papers):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiRaDtslycE

A lot has been made in the press coverage of these results about the evidence that the standard cosmological model is incomplete; see, e.g., here. Here are a few comments.

As I see it, taken on their own, the DESI BAO results are broadly consistent with the ΛCDM model as specified by the parameters determined by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) inferred from Planck. Issues do emerge, however, when these results are combined with other data sets. The most intriguing of these arises with the dark energy contribution. The simplest interpretation of dark energy is that it is a cosmological constant (usually called Λ) which – as explained here – corresponds to a perfect fluid with an equation-of-state p=wρc2 with w=-1. In this case the effective mass density of the dark energy ρ remains constant as the universe expands. To parametrise departures from this constant behaviour, cosmologists have replaced this form with the form w(a)=w0+wa(1-a) where a(t) is the cosmic scale factor. A cosmological constant Λ would correspond to a point (w0=-1, wa=0) in the plane defined by these parameters, but the only requirement for dark energy to result in cosmic acceleration is that w<0 not that w=-1.

The DESI team allow (w0, wa) to act as free parameters and let the DESI data constrain them, either alone or in combinations with other data sets, finding evidence for departures from the “standard values”. Here’s an example plot:

The DESI data don’t include the standard point (at the intersection of the two dashed lines) but the discrepancy gets worse when other data (such as supernovae and CMB) are folded in, as in this picture. The weight of evidence suggests a dark energy contribution which is decreasing with time.

These results are certainly intriguing, and a lot of credit is due to the DESI collaboration for working so hard to identify and remove possible systematics in the analysis (see the papers above) but what do they tell us about ΛCDM?

My view is that we’ve never known what the dark energy actually is or why it is so large that it represents 70% of the overall energy density of the Universe. The Λ in ΛCDM is really just a place-holder, not there for any compelling physical reason but because it is the simplest way of accounting for the observations. In other words, it’s what it is because of Occam’s Razor and nothing more. As with any working hypothesis, the standard cosmological model will get updated whenever new information comes to light (as it is doing now) and/or if we get new physical insights into the origin of dark energy.

Do the latest observations cast doubt on the standard model? I’d say no. We’re seeing an evolutionary change from “We have no idea what the dark energy is but we think it might be a cosmological constant” to “We still have no idea what the dark energy is but we think it might not be a cosmological constant”.

#baryonAcousticOscillations #cosmologicalConstant #Cosmology #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #OccamSRazor #ShaunHotchkiss

Cosmology Talks: Recent DESI Power Spectrum Results

Some weeks ago I posted an item about recent results that have emerged from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Collaboration. I have been a bit busy since then but I just saw that there is one of those Cosmology Talks about these results which I thought I would pass on. The contributors are Arnaud de Mattia, Hector Gil-Marín and Pauline Zarrouk and they are talking about the analsysis they have done using the “full shape” of the galaxy power spectrum. It’s quite a long video, but very illuminating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2mlU-YzEbw

#Cosmology #CosmologyTalks #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #DESI #Physics

New Results from DESI

I’ve just got time between meetings to mention that a clutch of brand new papers has emerged from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Collaboration. There is a press release discussing the results from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory here and one from the ICCUB in Barcelona here; several members of the group I visited there during sabbatical are working on DESI. Congratulations to them.

I haven’t had time to read them yet, but a quick skim suggests that the results are consistent with the standard cosmological model.

The latest batch contains three Key Publications:

• DESI Collaboration et al., DESI 2024 II: Sample Definitions, Characteristics, and Two-point Clustering Statistics
• DESI Collaboration et al., DESI 2024 V: Full-Shape Galaxy Clustering from Galaxies and Quasars
• DESI Collaboration et al., DESI 2024 VII: Cosmological Constraints from the Full-Shape Modeling of Clustering Measurements

together with the companion supporting papers:

• Ishak et al. (2024), Modified Gravity Constraints from the Full Shape Modeling of Clustering Measurements from DESI 2024
• Rosado-Marín et al. (2024), Mitigating Imaging Systematics for DESI 2024 Emission Line Galaxies and Beyond
• Bianchi et al. (2024), Characterization of DESI fiber assignment incompleteness effect on 2-point clustering and mitigation methods for Y1 analysis
• Forero-Sánchez et al. (2024), Analytical and EZmock covariance validation for the DESI 2024 results
• Findlay et al. (2024), Exploring HOD-dependent systematics for the DESI 2024 Full-Shape galaxy clustering analysis

The links lead to the arXiv version of these papers. These articles can also be found, along with previously released publications by the DESI Collaboration, here.

Anyone who has read the latest papers is welcome to comment through the box below!

#astronomy #Cosmology #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #darkMatter #DESI #ICCUB #Physics

A few months ago I posted an item about the release new results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). That was then followed by a presentation explaining the details which you can find here to find out more about the techniques involved. At the time the new DESI results garnered a lot of media attention much of it about claims that the measurements provided evidence for “New Physics”, such as evolving dark energy. Note that the DESI results themselves did not imply this. Only when combined with supernova measurements did this suggestion arise.

Now there’s a new preprint out by George Efstathiou of Cambridge. The abstract is here:

Recent results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration have been interpreted as evidence for evolving dark energy. However, this interpretation is strongly dependent on which Type Ia supernova (SN) sample is combined with DESI measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The strength of the evidence for evolving dark energy ranges from ~3.9 sigma for the Dark Energy 5 year (DES5Y) SN sample to ~ 2.5 sigma for the Pantheon+ sample. Here I compare SN common to both the DES5Y and Pantheon+ compilations finding evidence for an offset of ~0.04 mag. between low and high redshifts. Correcting for this offset brings the DES5Y sample into very good agreement with the Planck LCDM cosmology. Given that most of the parameter range favoured by the uncorrected DES5Y sample is discrepant with many other cosmological datasets, I conclude that the evidence for evolving dark energy is most likely a result of systematics in the DES5Y sample.

Here are a couple of figures from the paper illustrating the difference in parameter constraints using the uncorrected (left) and corrected (right) Dark Energy (Survey) 5 year Supernova sample.

The y-axis shows a parameter wa, which is zero in the standard model with non-evolving dark energy; the non-zero value implied by the left hand panel using the uncorrected data.

Just as with the Hubble Tension I blogged about yesterday, the evidence for a fundamental revision of our standard model may be nothing of the sort but some kind of systematic error. I think we can expect a response from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) team. Grab your popcorn.

https://telescoper.blog/2024/08/15/evolving-dark-energy-or-supernovae-systematics/

#Cosmology #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #DarkEnergySurvey #DES #DESI #evolvingDarkEnergy #Pantheon